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ok, I'll bite. I understand how the internet works as well as most people who don't spend most of their time writing RFCs (I owned an ISP back in the dial-up days and I've configured BGP as a network admin).

However, I also understand public choice economics and the fact that once the FCC begins to regulate the Internet (in the name of Net Neutrality), their incentives are driven by the politics of the commissioners (hence why this decision was 3 Dems vs. 2 Reps) and by the companies they regulate. It's nice when that sometimes coincides with the interests of the "regular guy", but it typically doesn't over time. Examples from history abound. See Baptists and Bootleggers.

I also understand that Comcast vs. Netflix was about contractual rights and was solved by the various parties making private agreements for bandwidth and transit usage, not by government regulation.

The supposed "reason" for the FCC regulations (prioritizing content providers by ISPs) isn't something that is actually happening in a widespread manner nor negatively affecting consumers, so why give a small government body control over the Internet so that they can over time regulate it pretty much however they want to.... and by want to, I mean how their political and embedded corporate interests want them to.

I'm happy to agree with you that Mozilla had every right to do what they did. Allowing people/companies, etc... make bad choices about what to do with their own resources is a valuable part of freedom. They just suffer the consequences if it was a bad choice.

Nothing you wrote disputes my point that when a company's values become more focused on A rather than B, when they used to be known for B, they will tend to drift off of success at B.

It applies to companies, people, countries, etc... they become successful because of a positive trait/action (like hard work, innovation, whatever) and then they become prideful and change their focus to something else and lose track of the values that got them there, then wonder why they start becoming less successful over time.

Someone's freedom doesn't extend to me being required to agree with them, just that I don't use force to stop them. Of course, many folks have lost sight of that, seeming to want to punish people for disagreeing with them on the latest controversial issue.

HughPickens.com (3830033) writes "The NYT reports that Hillary Rodham Clinton exclusively used a personal email account to conduct government business as secretary of state, State Department officials said, and may have violated federal requirements that officials’ correspondence be retained as part of the agency’s record. Clinton did not have a government email address during her four-year tenure at the State Department. Her aides took no actions to have her personal emails preserved on department servers at the time, as required by the Federal Records Act. “It is very difficult to conceive of a scenario — short of nuclear winter — where an agency would be justified in allowing its cabinet-level head officer to solely use a private email communications channel for the conduct of government business,” says Jason R. Baron. A spokesman for Clinton defended her use of the personal email account and said she has been complying with the “letter and spirit of the rules.”"Link to Original Source

Well, what do you expect with all the science deniers in Congress and the White House? If the Democratic Party members took global warming as seriously as the Republicans do, they'd quickly cut out the red tape and solve this nuclear waste storage issue in order to economically reduce reliance on fossil fuels, as places like Arizona do. Instead, they chase after non-scientific stuff like biofuels, where the science is settled.

Yeah, I'm waiting for someone to run a broadcast radio or TV advertisement that says something like "Hey Siri, Call 703 555 1212 (pay per call line) or "Hey Siri, Directions to XYZ business", or even "Hey Siri, search for malicious iPhone jailbreak website". You can also substitute in "Ok Google" as well to catch android phones...

Yeah. Oil prices go up for a while because of new demand, people figure out new techniques and start putting into production more wells, so oil prices go down and keep going down until some of the wells aren't profitable at the new prices, so they stop producing and the prices start going up, then the well and oil rights owners start producing more again and the prices goes back down again, and so on and so forth.

It's all just basic supply and demand curves, tied into a little technology and some lag times for changes. The only people who should be surprised are those folks who bought into the whole peak oil thing, somehow believing that we were magically going to run out of something that currently has more proven sources than are remotely economically workable at current prices/technological levels, but that can provide enough petroleum products to last the world for thousands of years... and more are discovered/proven every day when people bother to look for them.

Bottom line for what you want, which is FreeBSD, start with the manual.

Then go to the releases and pick the latest production, i.e. stable, release (Currently 10.1). Everything will be stable and binaries and source packages for your desired functions will all be available and up to date.

if you want a dedicated machine for one specific purpose, then another BSD might be better, but for multiple purposes/general purpose, just use FreeBSD. It'll be just as good as the others for specific purposes (just not by default, you'll have to run a command to install software, big deal), many of which have a FreeBSD source.

Ever read mainstream news reporting about a topic you were very familiar with? Perhaps something related to technology, or a local issue you were in the middle of?

Most people have had that experience. The more you know about something, the less the story seems to be accurate.

Yeah, all the rest of the news stories are about that accurate also, people just mostly don't notice.

Think about it.... it's mostly some j-school grad who asked a couple people some questions to get quotes, then threw the "story" together. Usually they're lucky if they understood what they were told, let alone can explain it in a manner which actually enlightens their audience.

My best luck as been with subject matter experts who blog on news topics related to their subject. So I get my economics news and analysis from economics professors (not the pet ones in the NY Times), my legal news from law professors and judges who blog, my technical news from a technical site focused on that part of the industry, etc...

Even then you have to be willing to read multiple viewpoints to try and see a bigger picture than one voice is going to paint for you.

Operating systems for gaming computers? I suppose your Playstation and your Wii and your Steam Machine run windows and WINE doesn't exist? Dude, don't confuse a monopoly with having a big market share.

De Beers managed to get to 85-90% of the world market for diamonds, not quite an actual monopoly... but as the diamondmarket is international, couldn't get all the governments to protect their market position by granting an actual monopoly and requiring their customers to purchase only their products. Guess what their market % is now? 40%? Lower? I guess they didn't have a natural monopoly after all.... market forces and all that.

Monsanto? No need to even go there in terms of IP. There are hundreds of seed companies farmers can buy from. Yeah, Monsanto is one of the biggest (at around 35% of the corn and soybean market share, just below DuPont) because many of their customers like their product combinations (pest control + seeds that resist it), but if another company came along tomorrow offering a better deal, how long would their market share last? One season, two? You're reading too much anti-GM propaganda and not looking at the actual facts.